This paper was presented at the EGPA 2004 conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The paper takes a theoretical approach to the question of non-public provision of welfare services. The argument is that the Swedish welfare state is dominated by a strong norm for public provision, where non-public providers are reduced to "alternatives" in a two-sided categorization of "public" and "private" providers of childcare. It is suggested that the "private" providers are in fact not a homogenous category but one with very different levels of co-production.